


Let The Devil In

by grayimperia



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Time Skip, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:01:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21825598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayimperia/pseuds/grayimperia
Summary: “So, Princess,” Claude says. “What are you—a sheep or a wolf?”He smiles at her, and Edelgard leans towards him in response. Both are aware of the challenge being levied—one wolf to another. “I don’t know,” she says. “Which one do the devils prefer?”Claude’s grin only grows at her answer. “Well, the goddess would take care of the sheep, right? The wolves are on their own.”“I don’t understand any of this,” Dimitri says. “There are no sheep or wolves—just people.”-Dimitri, Claude, and Edelgard spend a night in the woods with something that is not the goddess.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Edelgard von Hresvelg & Claude von Riegan, Edelgard von Hresvelg & Claude von Riegan
Comments: 22
Kudos: 262





	Let The Devil In

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by We Know The Devil. No need to have prior knowledge to understand the fic.

Edelgard sees lights in the distance. They flicker in the corner of her eye and disappear when she turns to look directly at them. 

She keeps looking over her shoulder out into the dark woods, and Claude smirks at her every time she resigns herself to nothing being there and goes back to the campfire. 

“Afraid of the dark, Princess?”

“No,” she says. “Just thought I saw something.”

He looks across their shared log to Dimitri coming back to their small camp, arms heavy with firewood. “Hey, Dimitri,” Claude says. “Any signs of life out there?”

Dimitri looks puzzled by the comment while Edelgard rolls her eyes. “I don’t think so. Though I might have heard a rabbit.” He frowns. “And I did disturb a roosting bird at one point. It’s quite jarring when they suddenly begin flapping their wings directly above you.”

Claude turns his smile on him. “Duly noted.”

Edelgard sighs and keeps her focus on the fire to tune out both Claude and the lights.

He seems to insist on taking the spotlight anyway. “So campers, are we going to call it for the night?”

Dimitri looks forlornly to the firewood at his feet. “I have made preparations to keep our fire going for a while longer, so I think I will stay up. I am not feeling tired, either.”

“I am fine, too,” Edelgard says.

Claude rolls out his shoulders as he stretches to his feet. “Well, personally I still feel like the night is young, but it’ll only stay young if we do something with it. So what do you say—who has a game in mind?”

Edelgard glances through the fire to Dimitri who has thoroughly busied himself with sorting his sticks. Behind him, she sees the lights.

“There is a game I used to play as a child with my father on long winter nights,” Dimitri says. “But, um, I’m not sure if I’d like to play it now.”

Claude sighs. “Right. Well, Princess, you have any suggestions.”

“No,” Edelgard answers. “But the silence does not bother me.”

“I could sing a song,” Dimitri says. “That was another game we would play. One of us would hum a familiar folk tune and the other would try to sing along. Most of Faerghus’s folk songs are about the snow or war, however. There are some about the goddess, too. Those might be more appropriate…”

Claude rubs the back of his head. “Alright, uh, songs are alright. You a good singer, Dimitri?”

“No,” he says with a shake of his head. “But it’s still enjoyable.”

“Fair enough,” Claude says. 

“Maybe a hymn would be better if we all want to sing,” Dimitri suggests. “We’re all more likely to know all the words.”

Claude’s smile falters. “Eh, I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve never had much an ear for lyrics.”

Edelgard shakes her head. “I’d prefer not to, as well. I think we all get more than enough of that back at the monastery.”

“Oh, looking for a little religious escape, Princess?” Claude asks. 

She shrugs. “Is that not why we have been sent outside of Garreg Mach’s walls? Have neither of you considered why we were sent to the woods to train rather than the training grounds?”

Dimitri frowns at his pile of sticks. “I assumed to hone our survival skills or something of that nature…”

“I heard,” Claude says, his grin growing wide, “that there’s a monster in the woods, and every year, they send out a group of students as sacrifices to appease its wrath.”

“That’s not funny, Claude,” Dimitri says. His hands in his lap ball up into fists. 

He pays Dimitri little heed. “It’s not just a monster, either. It’s a devil.”

Edelgard’s eyebrows rise up towards her hairline. “A devil?”

“That’s right,” Claude says. “You know how when you die, you go to the goddess or something? Well, there are some people the goddess doesn’t want—she passes her judgment and they don’t make the cut. Ever wonder where those people go?”

“A… devil takes them?” Edelgard repeats.

“Exactly.”

“I would really prefer to stop talking about this,” Dimitri says.

Claude laughs. “Ah, sorry, Dimitri. It’s just a bit of nonsense. Still, I think it’s fun to have something keeping you on your toes, you know?”

“Not really,” Dimitri says, pulling his cape closer around himself like a blanket. “The goddess is good and kind and gives people peace when they pass on. Why would she leave anyone to,” his face screws up as if the word causes him physical pain, “devils?”

Edelgard thinks she knows why. To perpetuate the system of power and the haves and have-nots of the current world order. Fall in line or fall into the darkness. Instead she says to ease Dimitri’s fraying nerves, “The goddess’s star wouldn’t be very peaceful if it was full of murderers and heretics. If you keep the sheep and the wolves together, soon only the wolves will remain, no matter how peaceful it was to begin with.”

Dimitri doesn’t seem to like that answer and he stares into the fire.

Claude whistles. “That’s a good way to put it. So, Princess, what are you—a sheep or a wolf?”

He smiles at her, and Edelgard leans forward towards him. Both are aware of the challenge being levied for her to respond with something clever—one wolf to another. “I don’t know,” she says. “Which one do the devils prefer?”

Claude’s grin only grows at her answer. “Well, from your logic, the goddess would take care of the sheep, right? The wolves are on their own.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Dimitri says. “There are no sheep or wolves—just people.”

“We know. It’s just an interesting way to think about things,” Claude says. “Though you are right—people are a bit more complicated in truth. After all, almost no one is born a wolf, and it’s rarer still they just snap and become one.”

Dimitri still has his brow furrowed in confusion. “Is it? I don’t think I follow.”

“It’s like,” Claude says. “Hmm… it’s like watching mold grow. There doesn’t seem to be anything there are at first and if you just keep staring at it, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, or it’s moving so slowly it doesn’t seem worth noticing. But if you leave it alone and come back to it later, you’ll be shocked by how much it’s taken root.”

It sounds more like the spread of corruption to Edelgard, but she is aware of the importance of measuring her words around outsiders. She remains quiet as Dimitri asks in a haunted voice, “And if it grows too much the devil takes you?”

“Exactly.”

“Claude, you should stop. You’re tormenting Dimitri,” Edelgard says. “Dimitri, don’t mind him. He just enjoys his nonsense.”

Claude places a hand over his heart. “Ah, betrayed. Weren’t you egging me on earlier?”

“I was before you started talking about mold covered wolves being taken by creatures in the night. Listen to yourself, Claude.”

He rolls his eyes. “When you take it all like that of course it sounds ridiculous.”

“No, Edelgard is right,” Dimitri says. “I think that is enough of that and we should retire for the night. I am suddenly feeling quite exhausted.”

Edelgard exchanges a look with Claude as Dimitri busies himself with putting out his fire. 

The lights in woods appear even brighter in the darkness, but neither Dimitri nor Claude appears to notice. Claude grouses about securing the last of their supplies in the dark, but to Edelgard, tiny full moons whisper in and out of sight around them.

Claude and Dimitri have one tent and Edelgard has another. She sits in the darkness until she hears the sounds of their shuffling still. She blinks and the willow-o’-wisps gather outside the thin fabric of her tent, shining through like a tiny sun. 

There is something in the woods that is not the goddess, and it speaks to her, alone. 

Maybe Claude is a wolf, too, like he says. But Edelgard could tear his throat out.

She slips outside and into the woods.

There is no trail, and she’s left to navigate the twisting wilderness by the faint lights over her head. The deeper she moves, the strong the lights seem to become even as they fly farther away from her. They gather together to make shapes—figures and silhouettes. She isn’t sure what she’s looking at for a time, but she keeps following after it. The lights bounce and skip as if they were children, and then they are children. 

Edelgard stops moving as the figures start to run ahead and rush past her. Some of the shapes are bigger than others—teenagers rather than children—but many of them are small. She counts as they go, and she freezes completely when she realizes there are ten of them.

They seem to move faster once they all appear, frolicking further into the dark. Edelgard takes another step forward when a pit of darkness somewhere ahead seems to be thicker than the general shade of the woods. The children made of light run towards it, and fade into it—taken and consumed by the lurking dark.

Edelgard isn’t sure why but suddenly her body feels cold, and she lurches after the strange figures. 

There’s a shout, “Edelgard!” and a hand on her shoulder. 

She whips back around to see Dimitri and Claude, panting out of breath, behind him. 

“Edelgard,” Dimitri says. “What are you doing out here? Claude had a bad feeling and went to check on you, and your tent was empty. Did you hear something?”

Edelgard’s mouth feels numb, and she can’t answer. Instead, she turns back, and the last and smallest of the light children has almost reached the darkness. 

Edelgard tears herself out of his grip and takes off after it.

-

Claude had heard something even before he went to bed. It sounded like something was creeping around them—multiple somethings, almost like a group of predators circling in on their prey. Edelgard kept glancing around to strange directions, and he was almost grateful for it. It wasn’t good to let your enemy know you were onto them, lest they change their plans and leave you in the dark again. But if there was something, she would likely see it before it jumped them.

In Almyra, the legends were grounded to the earth. The earth does and does not wreck havoc when it wants to, and anything creeping in the dark was just another hand of nature. 

Real wolves were something to be afraid of. Claude had looked up at the two before him, and as the cracking ebbed in and out of his hearing, he thought it might be fun to scare them with a metaphoric wolf or two. 

The goddess and whatever demon he summons up from the depths of his imagination are both fictional. Though as he smiles at Edelgard, he becomes aware that if the goddess was to throw one of them out, it might not actually be him. 

He circles the perimeter of his tent with Dimitri before settling in for the night. Edelgard closes the flap on hers early, and Claude stares after it until Dimitri asks if he’s coming. 

In their cramped tent, Claude lies on his back and listens.

Marianne prays at the cathedral everyday, but she was rarely forthcoming about her relationship with the goddess. Ignatz was also a frequent visitor, though the most Claude could get out of him with resorting to harassing the poor boy was that he was an admirer of beauty and the goddess was the epitome of it.

But that wasn’t how Seteth or the Archbishop spoke of the goddess. They and all the priests and nuns who’d spare him a second said that the goddess spoke back when you listened for her.

Claude opened his ears in the most holy of her sanctuaries and heard nothing. 

In Almyra, he rarely heard anything other than that which could be explained. Rain, lightning, wind. If anything was calling him, he was too deaf to make out its words. 

Tonight, he strains his ears, and he hears something else. It creaks and aches, and when Dimitri stills, he can make out that it’s not the sound of cracking branches. It’s something deeper, as if the earth itself was splitting. 

Claude waits as long as he can. Perhaps it made sense to leave Almyra, even if he didn’t have half a place in Fodlan. He never could quite fit into the feasts for warriors and their acts of bravery. 

The rationalization takes over him. Whatever sounds like it’s breaking in two is coming from directly beneath where he’s lying. If it is real, he shall fall into the earth. But a quick glance at Dimitri and his undisturbed slumber, confirms for Claude that it’s all in his head. He waits a few minutes more and remains firmly on the ground and not in its depths. Something is calling to him, but refusing its answer has so far not resulted in his untimely death, and Claude sees no reason not to stay the course. 

He stares back up into the nothing and wills the sounds to retreat. They don’t, and Claude resigns himself to the trembling in his head and a night of poor sleep until he can return to Garreg Mach and ask if the goddess sounds like a person or an earthquake. He turns over and watches Dimitri and his stillness for a moment more.

Then, Claude remembers Edelgard and the noise in his head gets louder.

Dimitri must have been less asleep than Claude thought as he stirs immediately when Claude attempts to slip out of the tent to check on her. He attempts to wave him off, insisting he just needs a minute of privacy to attend to nature’s call. The storm in his ears must have impacted the tone of his voice, because even in his impressive naïveté, Dimitri doesn’t seem to believe him. 

They broach Edelgard’s empty tent together, and then charge after the faintest wisp of white hair illuminated by the moon that they can see.

Edelgard looks even more haunted when they find her, and she wrenches herself out of Dimitri’s grip to keep charging off alone. Dimitri reels back from her touch as if he was burned, but Claude gives chase. 

Edelgard is quick on her feet, but she’s no hunter, and her short strides and numerous stumbles over roots and branches obscured by the darkness give Claude ample time to catch up with her.

Claude’s not as strong as Dimitri, and the cracking sounds loud enough that he can barely hear his own voice as he calls for her to stop. But it’s not so loud that he can’t think, and he dives after her.

They stumble and tumble down into the dirt when he tackles her. Claude makes an inelegant final landing on his back and lets out a groan at the impact. Edelgard sits straight up as soon as possible and looks near ready to bolt again. She whips her head around back and forth, but whatever she’s looking for must not be there because she settles her gaze on Claude.

“What was that for?” she asks.

Claude groans again as he hoists himself back up to a sitting position. “You’re asking me that? After that weird stunt you pulled?”

“I was just going for a walk when you came out of nowhere,” she says, though her voice trembles enough that he knows she is at least aware how bad her lie sounds. 

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “Just a stroll through the densest part of the woods all by yourself in the middle of the night. Nothing strange about that.”

Edelgard crosses her arms and scowls at the ground. “I was just looking for something. That’s all.”

“Did you find it?” Claude drawls.

She sighs and buries her face in her hands. 

They sit in silence for a few moments with only the crickets to fill the void. It’s only then that Claude realizes whatever was assaulting his ears earlier has vanished. 

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Did you… when you were on your little completely normal stroll, did you hear anything?”

It’s Edelgard’s turn to stare at him. “No. Did you?”

“Yeah,” Claude confesses. “But it’s gone now. Weird.”

She takes one more glance at the woods surrounding them. “Probably just a wild animal. Or…”

“A devil?”

Edelgard shakes her head. “Haven’t you had enough of that?”

“Nah, I think it’s interesting,” he says. “You saw something weird, I heard something weird—sounds like the work of something supernatural.” He throws his arms out to the sides. “And we’re out of the goddess’s garden. Now’s the time for a devil to come gobble us up.”

Edelgard tucks a strand of her truly mused hair behind her ear. “Saying things like that is a great way to earn yourself someone’s ire.”

“And have I earned yours?”

She gives him a sidelong glance. “Yes, but not because of that.”

Claude laughs. “Is that so? So you won’t tattle on me and my heresy, and I’ll keep quiet about your little break for it.”

“You think I was running away?”

“You were running from something.”

“No, I,” she frowns and shifts so her arms are wrapped around her knees, making herself a small and protected ball. “I don’t run from things. That isn’t right at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Like I said, I thought I saw something.”

“And you went after it alone?”

“Well, I’m not alone now am I?”

Claude smiles. “I’ll take that as a thank you. So you’re welcome for not letting you succumb to the darkness.”

Edelgard sighs. “Is that what I was doing?”

“I don’t know. Let me take a look at you.” Edelgard raises her head from the tops of her knees just enough as Claude scoots closer to examine her. “Let’s see,” he says. “I don’t see anymore mold… yep, looks like you’re good.”

She rolls her eyes. “So you’re saying I’m just as corrupted and evil as I always was.”

“As far as I can tell, yeah,” Claude says. “And there’s nothing wrong with a little evil. After all, whose evil are we measuring? The church’s evil is different my evil, which is probably different from your evil.”

Edelgard finally does smile then. “You are going to get kicked out of the monastery if you can’t keep those things to yourself.”

“They are to myself. I can say whatever I want as long as no one’s listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“Are you?”

She takes another long look at him. “I’m listening, and I’m seeing, but I’m not repeating. Is that good enough for you?”

Claude stands, brushing himself off, and extending a hand to Edelgard. “All I can usually ask.”

She takes his hand, and they stand alone in the darkness. She glances around, though this time, it doesn’t seem as frantic or dazed. “Did we lose Dimitri?”

Claude strains his ears for the sounds of his stomping footsteps, but he hears nothing. “Thought he was behind me…”

They glance to each other and their conjoined hands. They tread back the few steps that they came together, but whatever lurked no longer calls for them.

-

Claude vanished. 

Edelgard had been white as a ghost, and she ran. She pushed him away and her hands felt like fire. 

Claude whipped past him, his lither form nearly bulling him over from the gust of wind that accompanied his dash. 

But Dimitri is alone.

Neither Claude nor Edelgard had said anything, but Dimitri knows he isn’t quite right today. He must have touched a plant he was allergic to or something of that nature once they left Garreg Mach. His hands felt cold and numb, which is why he had so thoroughly insisted on a fire. Now, his feet are heavy and lumbering, and when he glances down at the rest of him, he can feel the chill crawling up his limbs and torso and neck and face.

Dimitri felt it earlier, too. Claude started talking about the lurking darkness that takes root and consumes, and Dimitri had held his cloak closer so Claude and Edelgard wouldn’t be able to see the growth already manifesting on him.

He wanders the woods now.

Dimitri tries to be good. If he tries, he’ll be good and one day join his family who were also so, so good. But there’s something else in him. Felix had named it the boar, and then Claude named it the wolf and laughed with Edelgard as if they knew what that meant. 

There’s a chill in the air. Dimitri can see his own breath. Whatever is on his skin pulls him further. 

He tries to be a sheep as best he can. He says please and thank you and does his best to replace whatever he breaks when he can’t control himself. If he puts all the broken things back together, then it’s like he never destroyed them in the first place. He’ll be allowed on the goddess’s star with his family.

The cold is loud, too. As he walks, he starts to hear the sounds of snow crunching under his boots, and he sees the gentle glowing snowflakes falling down around them. 

But mostly he feels.

Claude and Edelgard both shirked church service and turned up their noses at the goddess whenever the Archbishop said she was there to accept and love them. They were already good people, so they didn’t have to try so hard to be good. 

Dimitri would clasp his hands so tight it hurt. He didn’t know all the words to the hymns or all the messages Seiros had spread. He’d forget the exact date the goddess was revived and stumble over exactly which battle cause her to give her blessings to the Ten Elites. But if he tried, then he could freeze whatever rotten thing was growing inside of him that only he could see. 

Claude and Edelgard would go back and forth in a language Dimitri could never understand about the future and the lofty things they wanted. 

Dimitri just wanted to be good. And so he holds his chest being consumed by the frost, then holds his hands out when something warm and honeyed draws near. 

He doesn’t know where Claude and Edelgard are. But something is here, and he sees it and hears it and feels in his heart that whatever it is will make him good.

It feels like ice and looks like snow and sounds like a folk song he used to sing when he was a child and not a wolf left alone to the devil.

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to do a fic like this for a while. I played We Know The Devil quite a while ago and thought is would be interesting to combine the ideas behind it with a few other principles to make a kind of image, theme heavy character study that might be a bit over the top but was ultimately very fun to write, haha. Anyway, hope you enjoyed!


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